Description
Partita No. 5 in G major has seven movements: Praeambulum, Allemande, Corrente, Sarabande, Tempo di Minuetta, Passepied and Gigue. The Passepied is the sixth, a light dance placed just before the closing Gigue. The passepied was a quick triple-time dance favoured at the French court, and in a suite it is one of the movements added to the standard sequence.
In G major and 3/8, its bars are short and it moves along with each bar felt almost as a single beat. It has a modest 395 notes in 80 seconds, and its range, D2 to C6, fits on a 61-key keyboard.
Rated intermediate. More than finger speed, it needs a sense of metre: a light weight on the first beat and the rest kept in the air. Counted wrongly, 3/8 quickly turns heavy, so first listen at a reduced playback speed with each bar heard as one unit, then repeat short phrases with the A-B loop until the bouncing rhythm settles in. Heard together with the movements around it, its lightness within the suite becomes clear. Being short, it is also easy to play through again and again.
Suite-form works from the Baroque era; Bach's Partitas, a sequence of varied dances, are ranked among the greatest keyboard works.
Browse all songs in Partitas →Sheet Music
Sheet music provided by Mutopia Project
About the Composer
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Johann Sebastian Bach was the towering figure of German Baroque music, serving for decades as Cantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Renowned for his mastery of counterpoint, he laid the foundations of keyboard music with works such as The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Inventions. This site includes minuets and polonaises from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, the Inventions and Sinfonias, and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier. The Notebook pieces are catalogued with BWV Anh. (appendix) numbers, but many are by other composers - Petzold's minuets among them - or by no one known, and most of their song pages give the current view of who wrote them.
View all works by Bach →